Smart Acquisition or Frankenstack? Stagwell-Freestar and DoorDash-Instacart

0:08Welcome to The Big Story, a roundtable featuring members of the AdExchanger editorial team. Every week, we bring you an in-depth discussion of key developments in digital marketing and media.

0:23Today's episode is sponsored by Basis, the leading intelligent operating system for autonomous advertising. Its enterprise AI solution transforms campaign briefs into strategies and media plans that integrate directly into omni-channel activation. You can learn more at basis.com. It's fall and there's M &A in the air. I'm always intrigued by the rationale for acquisitions, from some that feel like true fits that are meant for each other to the ones that feel a bit more like companies are creating a Frankenstack. So sorry, I had to get that spooky season reference in there. Today, we have two deals to discuss and we'll discuss whether they're a true fit or perhaps a frankensnack.

1:09First up, Stagwell bought Freestar, as in a company that helps marketers bought a company that helps publishers. Why would an indie agency want to build a company that helps open web publishers better set up their ad stacks? Our managing editor, Anthony Vargas, who covered the acquisition, has more. This is going to be a good combo. Then, when retailers merge, retail media changes. And the extremely fragmented retail media space might defragment just a little through a series of deals that are in the works. First up, there is news from the Wall Street Journal this week that DoorDash is in advanced talks to buy Instacart.

1:47And if it did, DoorDash ads and Instacarts would likely come together. And on top of that, Instacart recently announced that it was going to manage the retail media business for GoPuff via its white-labeled retail media business. So if you imagine Russian nesting dolls or that image of a whale eating a shark, eating a fish, that is the type of M &A that we're seeing here in the other deal-making. It's going to change how marketers work with retail media companies, and our senior editor, James Herscher, has more. I'm Sarah Sluice, our editorial director. And before we start, I want to share what's on my calendar that could be on yours in coming weeks and months.

2:23Next week, I'll be in New York City at our Top Woman event. I'm hoping to see some of you honorees there and your biggest supporters of the Chelsea Piers. This is the most glam event in ad tech. So I hope you'll buy your ticket or tell your friends to buy one if you're honored or enter next year. And if you've got FOMO from Missing Prog.io New York City, or you just want more events, we have CTV World coming up at the end of March, and we've got Ad Exchanger Connect in Las Vegas. Ad Exchanger Connect is going to be our deep dive conference where you learn from your peers, lots of interactive workshops.

2:54CTV is, of course, about all things CTV. And you can use the code SarahMVL or Sarah Most Valuable Listener. Of course, I'm a Sarah with an H for a 10 % discount on the early bird rates. Okay. And with that, we're going to dive in. I saw the headline, Anthony, and I was like, whoa, like this is really interesting. I need to know why. I need to know the rationale. um and i think my very first thought which we've discussed is that when i hear a buy side company buy a sell side company my thought was are they creating an ad network so am i wrong that this is going to be an ad network type play um so i think you know whenever we're kind of talking about ad networks um it's like a pretty nebulous phrase that can mean all kinds of like scary boogeyman things in the industry.

3:48If you're concerned around ad networks is just the idea of misaligned incentives between the buy side and sell side, those are always kind of a thing. I think that is going to apply here because the idea, according to PreStar CEO Kurt Donald, is this acquisition is going to help Stagwell better serve buyers and publishers. It's going to be a win-win on both sides. So like whenever you kind of hear that language, you think about like, can there really be a win-win on both sides or is there going to be some kind of like compromise in the middle? And I guess, you know, Stagwell saying all the right things about like, you know, buyers will be able to pick and choose what kind of free star inventory they're including in their campaigns.

4:35You know, Stagwell's interest here is more about like, you know, free stars, managed services for publishers, less about like the idea of like, oh, you know, like this will factor into their principal media business but like it's that was like just part of like this so that they were really more concerned with uh with the managed service side of things according to uh the ceo of their own media division ben berenson that's what he was telling me um but you know all that being said it you know it's the case that stagwell is going to be collecting a share on the buy side they're going to be collecting managed service fees on the on the sell side so if you have concerns about those incentives i mean i don't know if i'm going to be able to say anything to delay those usually the the agencies like there's this trend of agencies buying tech and usually you know they're buying on the buy side which makes intuitive sense um but also does mean that like whenever you buy a company like that as an agency now you have to worry about all of its clients that are at these other agencies um like we've heard this about like Like, oh, like Citrus ad was like a real up and coming challenger to Criteo, right?

5:47And it's like rearview mirror for a while, like gets acquired. And, you know, it just sort of opens up an opportunity in every sales pitch for a competitor to be like, yeah, I'm sure the same with Epsilon and Publicis, IPG, Axiom. It's like, you know, that's going like right to this other holdco, right? Like you can't enjoy that very much. Whereas now companies can't do like other holdcos, you know, it's not the same thing because it's like a publisher business. Like they don't they're not even like aware, like they don't even like work with Freestar in that kind of a way. So that is one thing like other other holdcos can't just like pull a plug now.

6:27I think the question is, is it's 19 years later. Is this like when 24-7 real media was bought by GroupM? So this has happened before. They bought an ad network, they merged it into Zaxxas, and then they were able to funnel their client spend to Zaxxas and kind of take whatever percentage the ad network would be taking on that, maybe 30%, maybe 70%. You never know. But they're definitely set up in a way that they could take advantage of that ad network model. They're saying it's going to help their principal media buying business, which I think is them saying that without maybe outlining all of the details and all the slides in the slide deck.

7:12I think, you know, what I am debating in my mind is, is this actually going to be perhaps a better thing, given that the dynamics of the open web have changed? Like maybe it truly will be good for publishers to have an agency prioritize its clients and get all of that spend. And it's also probably going to be good for marketers who are under pressure from their procurement to keep the cost of their agency low. And if some of that cost happens through their media buys instead of kind of this more transparent fee, maybe that's a trade-off that they're willing to make. So I think that the details are TBD.

7:56But I think the hard part will be that this is a company that needs to look out for its buy side and its sell side, right? But the sell side is now owned by the buy side. So in order for Stagwell not to lose all the FreeStar clients, it's going to have to keep them happy enough and keep their monetization high enough that they're not going to leave FreeStar. So I think that's their incentive to not suck, to speak really frankly. And I think, yeah. I just to kind of build on that point, you just like right now is kind of the time for publishers to be re-examining who they're working with and all that stuff because they're under so much pressure from all the changes on search and social media and the impacts to their their traffic that you know if you're a publisher and you're looking at like you know if you're dealing with like your parent company being like we're making 50 less revenue this year change our you know our ad network or change our like you know monetization partner or like whatever like you know that could easily just be like a reason for a publisher to be like all right well i'm gonna move away from freestar and try like one of the half dozen freestar competitors or you know more that are out there so it's like you know there is a lot of pressure on publishers right now to be examining these things and yeah there's going to be a lot of you know prove it to me kind of arguments to be made i'm sure there is this sort of tendency with i think a lot of these ad networks and you know you could sort of um like you could you know i was going to say like oh this reminds me this isn't an ad network this is the trade desk open path and i'm like oh wait like isn't that an ad network and like oh like it's kind of like principal media it's like wait that's kind of like an ad network setup or is it is it like curation oh wait that's also supposed to be an ad network often there you get like this great efficiency pitch like oh you're getting a killer rate because we've consolidated the pipeline but you always seem to lose transparency like hmm like why is that when I use this product, I stop being able to see where my ad ran, like, or something like that.

10:02Other just sort of details that seem sort of basic if I'm buying in the open exchange or something like that. Like just these things do seem to like close down in a like not credible way whenever this does happen. I also am curious. I know that Freestar and Stagwall didn't disclose the deal price. We know that Freestar has been struggling. It's been having some layoffs. I mean, I'm assuming the layoffs are a tell, right, that they're struggling in the market. The 24-7 real media acquisition was$649 million. I'm imagining that this swing, this bet, like, let's try to see if we can do an ad network, did not come at a nine-figure price.

10:47Does that sound fair like i would be very surprised like most uh most estimates put um free stars annual revenue at about 70 million dollars circa 2024 so i would be very surprised if they sold for you know a high six figure amount uh is that the right math i said nine nine figures thank you i'm like wait a minute that's that's two that's two figures like i just i covered market bridge another one of these sort of agency services companies. There's a bunch of them, like, you know, S4 kind of fits into this. There's like Nowhere Tech. You know, a lot of people clearly have the same idea, like, oh, we're going to buy a bunch of like agencies, each one like sort of fill a part of this stack overall.

11:34And I think, you know, one of the things that came up was that I think this is a bad time to be trying to raise money for one of these like venture startups that, you know, five, 10 years ago everyone was like oh like growth and blah blah like big bet and like now everybody is pessimistic like nobody wants to buy like a software vendor um it's just like rough money just money in general is tight and then you layer on the just you know headwinds in this specific category yeah so all these companies that have raised a bunch of money before like there's you know they can't go back to the well so it's like end of the line yeah and on on the topic of freestar like i mean you know they're very much one of those kind of like managed services technology companies and uh as we've kind of discussed like their their vertical the publisher vertical has been very much placed under pressure by all these kind of like external things so you know i think a lot has changed for freestar since it was on that like inc 500 list of like fast growing companies back in what was that like 2019 or 2020 whatever it was yeah yes and i'm like i'm actually looking right now i'm like oh they're on the ink 5000 list as late as 2024 according to one of their websites so um yeah yeah i mean yeah yeah i was just gonna say like you know you can imagine that a lot of that is just like changed as like the picture around like publishers has changed more generally and like you know when we talk about like layoffs and stuff like i mean we would definitely see like some like chatter that like freestar has just like non-stop rolling layoffs like you know and like the glass door comments and people complaining about like oh yeah they're constantly doing layoffs i don't know if that's like a thing that's unique just a free star when it comes to like these like publisher networks because like it's also something sometimes before you prepare for a sale so if they if they were preparing for that you know but we don't know the what was the chicken what was they there yeah yeah and like yeah like some of its competitors like media vine they've like had like big public layoffs like in the last like year or so like so like you know it feels like it's like just kind of a bad time for that entire category and so like it could be the case that this was a little bit of a distressed asset that stagwell saw an opportunity to get on the cheap um the bigger play for me though is always it's like less about these kind of like arguments of like the ad industry of the past although that's probably where the practical benefits for stagwell are going to come from like these old tried and true like margin plays it's their positioning more is it like this is an agentic ai thing we've got the media machine we need publisher side signals we need first party publisher data to train that that media machine on the best audiences for our buyers so this is like a proximity to publisher data play that they're positioning for the future of like agentic buying and like this idea that like you know publishers are just going to have to be more agile just in general when it comes to like integrating with with uh seller agents to communicate with buyer agents or you know not owning their own like tech stack which has like dragged down a lot of like big legacy publishers in the past so like you know they're they're positioning it more looking to these like forward looking opportunities than like the the the old kind of industry tricks of the past but that being said those those old tricks are probably still pretty viable too i mean this is actually making me think of an old trick or right we know why everyone thought Google was amazing because it's pixel was everywhere and you could kind of track the customer journey all the way through to purchase.

15:08I mean, Freestar, it's got a thousand sites. So that could be a way to track consumers in a few different places and get a better understanding and build better customer profiles. So I think that's a real, a real thing, or we just, we were talking about Marissa Mayer's new startup, Dazzle, that apparently uses like metadata from phones and like your photo library in order to personalize the AI better. Like it's like, okay, we'll train on this and then give you better home recommendations. So it is, there are some really clever applications of data using AI. So I think, I think that's, that's interesting.

15:47I feel like Freestar too, like to, you know, there was this, you know, recent news, like Freestar was one of the handful of companies named and targeted by Apple. Um, because, you know, so Freestar, Trade Desk, Autogen, Permutiv, ID5. So like they've identified the here's, you know, these are the big footprints. The company is with tags and pixels on hundreds or thousands of sites. Like they kind of did like, they've got the best view in the world and they kind of did our work and said, here's, here's a few companies. with like real scale across the web. And they're also, you know, so like that's the pro.

16:27And then also because they're on this list and now everyone's, you know, everyone just goes, oh, like, you know, this is the kind of company that just can't be viable on itself moving forward. Like if you are one of these third party identity resolution, like, you know, ad tech in the weeds types, like everyone's just kind of like written you off now. It's like, how do you get by? Like last week on, you know, this program, like we had this whole conversation that was like toast. Everybody, you know, like, what do you do here? It's like, well, here's what you do. You like fold into a big services group that can absorb you.

17:02And actually like for for Stagwell, like this is an incredible data pickup. Like they have no data like this. Like this is really prized stuff. And they can probably do something interesting with it. This acquisition just like it lights me up. I'm super into it because it's not just a same buying same. It's really a same buying something completely different. The other side of the coin, they've got the whole coin now. It's just really fascinating to see what they'll do with it. You know, I think also more challenging from an execution perspective and just they're definitely going to have to hold different stakeholders with very different needs and kind of find a compromise that won't alienate either side.

17:51So that's going to be a big challenge. And it sounds like James, kind of your takeaway is like, for the open web publishers or anyone who has a lot of revenue from the open web to survive, like you got to get creative by get bought by an agency. Like that's, that's quite creative. I'm into it. Yeah, I don't. Yeah, there's no any big publisher probably does this itself. And the all the you You know, the 90 % of the other publishers are all kind of dying and they don't have a lot of money themselves to spend. So, yeah, tough market. So we're going to take a break. We're going to end there. Lots to noodle on.

18:27We'll keep a close eye on this acquisition. And then when we get back, we're going to talk about retailers buying each other in retail media. yeah.

18:41I'm Sarah Sluice, Editorial Director of Ad Exchanger. And with me today is Michael Olson, EVP of Client Development at Basis, which is supporting our podcast this month. We're going to talk about something that doesn't get enough attention, paying invoices. What is the cost of slow financial reconciliation and who is the most impacted? Hi, Sarah. Thanks for having me. The cost is time, cash flow, and trust. When financial reconciliation takes too long, payments get held up and finance teams, whether they're in agencies or ad brands, are just chasing down numbers. People are spending a ridiculous amount of time figuring out why two systems do not match.

19:27Agencies probably feel it the most because they're stuck in the middle carrying the float. They have the client asking questions on one side and media partners on the other. The longer it takes, the more time everyone spends fixing the past instead of focusing on performance and health and growth of the business. So you outlined a very frustrating problem. I would not want to be that person chasing down invoices. Is this primarily a technology problem, a workflow problem, or a people problem? It's all of the above, but I'd lean towards mostly a workflow problem. The industry definitely doesn't have a shortage of technology or data.

20:08We have a shortage of systems that actually work together. And when they don't, people end up filling in all the gaps manually. They end up downloading spreadsheets, comparing reports, sending emails, chasing down discrepancies. It's a mess. Technology is obviously part of that answer, but another piece of software by itself just simply doesn't fix it. It's imperative for technology to actualize omni-channel data monthly and push to reconciliation systems. As an industry, we have to connect the tech stacks interoperably, end to end, and then allow the technology to do the heavy lifting to align the data between the contracts, media plans, media transactions, and the payments.

20:54Okay, so it sounds like technology and workflow can make this just a bit easier. What does automated reconciliation look like? A lot of automation talk right now. And if I'm thinking about the future agentic state, ideally, reconciliation just happens. AI is constantly looking at delivery, spend, invoices, payments, and then flagging issues as they happen. Instead of somebody finding them three weeks later, and in a lot of cases, it should be, the AI should be able to fix those issues without a person ever touching them with the correct harnesses in place. People should only have to get involved when something unusual happens, which is the human oversight.

21:37That gets away from this huge month-end exercise that costs a lot of time and resources and much closer to knowing where you stand financially at any given time. This is the ideal state basis is going towards for our connection with Prisma by MediaOcean, a platform used by numerous agencies for financial reconciliation. Okay, so it sounds like by connecting those two different platforms and adding Agentec AI, we can make it a lot easier and people won't have to chase down invoices all the time like they used to. So thank you so much for sharing with us what that would look like. And thanks to Basis for supporting our podcast.

22:15Thanks for having me, Sarah.

22:22And we are back. So James, we were hit this week with the news that DoorDash might buy Instacart. Really interesting deal. Apparently, Instacart was also looking to be acquired by Uber, that didn't pan out. We don't know if this one will pan out, but I'm curious how you would describe DoorDash ads, retail media business, and then Instacart and its carrot ads, retail media network. This is an interesting one. And it actually goes back to end of last week. I think the information first reported that there was like a maybe a deal. Instacart was up for sale. Then this week we saw like advanced talks, it seems like.

23:03So, you know, we'll see what happens there. But it definitely is interesting. These are some of the like the sort of the bigger players, actually, revenue wise, like really strong tier two kind of players and up to really interesting things in the retail media space. DoorDash, I feel like people probably don't even like appreciate how big of a company that is. like maybe like uber is the same way like people don't like it might just be like huh really like yeah there's like a tons of stuff packed in there break it break it down a little bit so doordash so they have all sorts of like that doordash has um grubhub seamless um and they also have like strategic investments with um wonder which is like mark laurie's group um they also have like they've folded into DoorDash now like you know people really think of them as like ordering you know food from a nearby restaurant but they also have like a lot of convenience store stuff you mentioned that they are now essentially like the white label tech they're the ad sales house of GoPuff so and there probably are other like white labels you know other retailers who use them so they're yeah they're like an interesting ads business they've definitely been on my radar for a while.

24:29They bought this company Symbiosis, which is like a really interesting retail media ad tech startup by like the former Google search product guy. And it's, it really gets into like bidding when DoorDash is going to sort of co-bid along with a brand or, you know, when, when Symbiosis first came out, the idea was sort of like, you know, Target knows which brands or what kind of searches maybe are going to lead to like a big cart or something like that. So then if somebody does like a Google search for this product, you know, they're going to boost this like Nathan's search because they know someone's going to fill out the whole like 4th of July cart or something like that.

25:09So, right, there's all these like other elements where all of a sudden you have multiple bidding like factors involved. And DoorDash has lots of this weird stuff people don't even like realize or it's like oh like add a coke to your order and it's like oh sure like that makes sense and it's actually like that was like a retail media buy that like coke did and now someone's picking that up from like somewhere else over here and it's like they're meeting like that and so people like a coke will show up and they're like wait this was like this is weird um yeah and so that's how like retail media is working inside doordash um so so yeah it would be an interesting one for sure like these are such big app players huge data harvesters door dash has been pretty acquisitive i think to your point i was also surprised at how large they were but they own deliveroo which is very popular in the uk they own wolt which is a uh helsinki based company i think that's Norwegian yeah yeah yeah i think it has it looks like it also might be popular in other areas like israel so they've got they've got a lot of brands and they're stable that's the route that they've gone and so instacart would be another brand and they're stable and then in turn instacart how it counts all of these different you know smaller grocery chains um as part of its carrot ads retail media network so a sales house for publics and wegmans and a lot you know a lot of ones where it's like oh wait really like and Now, you know, so it's going to get like all folded weirdly into DoorDash if that were to happen.

26:42And just from a from a scale perspective, it's just if you go to like the DoorDash, you know, website, it's interesting to say like we have 56 million monthly active users. I'm like, wait, what are you like meta or like Netflix? You're talking you're talking you're talking about MAUs like it's interesting to see this terminology be applied to retail media, you know. And Instacart does the same, too. and they really try to foster. Instacart has a big strategic partnership with the New York Times because they really value, they look at attention, time per user, and stuff. They look at a lot of the same metrics that social media and entertainment kind of apps think about.

27:23They think about too. Forgive my ignorance. I don't do home grocery delivery, so I don't know if Instacart does this, but like DoorDash is very much a subscription service, you know, like, so like it makes sense that like it would be bubbly, a bundle, bubbling, bundling with these other publishers, you know, like looking at like monthly average users, like a Netflix, you know, like those kinds of things. So like this. Yeah. Actives, which is, that's like how many customers engage will be where I'm going to, I'm going to out Alison Schiff. Cause she was saying she DoorDash to cast iron pan once, which I, that might be my favorite uh thing to hear someone's door dash um and i think like to to your point about active users it's like like i'll say i'll cop to this like i uh have a seamless so uh it's it's one of them it's either door dash or seamless or one of the other ones um subscription i don't always use it every month so it's like there is a whole pool of people who pay for like the subscription service and aren't necessarily like making orders and stuff which is like also like a problem that the streamers and publishers have where it's like if people are paying that doesn't mean that they're engaging with the app all the time and it's a similar business model as well where you know how like with your phone bill you sometimes were getting a streaming service bundled there's a lot of credit cards that will give you a free like your dash premium or you get like credit every month you see uber doing that too so there's a lot of uh things they're doing to try to to bring more people on the on on board to their service doordash and instacart are also you know you maybe not unique but they both are alike in that they're like retail and merchant business like that whole client base hates them like all like you know every restaurant and like company that works with doordash deeply begrudges that they have to work you know they feel compelled to and they do so like under duress and retailers that work with instacart like don't want like all of them feel like in their just hearts and souls are just like fucking instacart like they just hate having to like you know have this intermediary it's like that feels like oh this feels like our job like get out like you get out of here instacart i believe that i think that me i don't know this is the mba term but it's like a two-sided marketplace like an ad network is a two-sided marketplace like you know run by one company same thing with doordash uber all the retail media companies they they got stuff on both sides well actually not all because some retail media is like amazon like they're a sell side that are only really working with the other side unless they bring on other customers then they would be more or only but then again there's the amazon yeah i guess they are they are because they've got the sellers as their customers and the consumers.

30:15They are. I correct myself. Okay. So I want to bring up GoPuff first before we kind of dive into like what, you know, all of these companies mashup together might mean for marketers, but then, you know, to the point of carrot ads, just kind of the latest, you know, data point in a trend, but we're starting to see some consolidation if we have a company like GoPuff, which I feel like is a competitor to DoorDash choosing to run with carrot ads. They're saying it's a non-core part of our business. So sure, you run this piece of it. Does that, if Instacart is managing GoPuff and then DoorDash is managing Instacart, which means it's all kind of running together, does that make it easier for the CPGs and other companies that are spending their retail media budgets?

31:08Is there less annoyance around fragmentation or how does it change the market easier you know if you have if you if those are otherwise like if you're pepsi and you are you know you're everywhere and you're and otherwise you got a lot like from from their perspective it's like you got to be in every single one so it's like i'd rather log into one platform than a dozen interfaces um i think that probably is good you know who knows what happens when it is you know i think like advertisers probably feel like oh like maybe you know you feel more like prized at these other places and now all of a sudden it's like oh like i'm not a big fish in this doordash pond anymore or something like that um it's still a double-edged sword of like you know maybe it's easier for me to manage all these different properties, but then I have less choice as a buyer.

32:02And like, you know, like maybe my partnership isn't as strong in the big conglomerate as it was when I had all these different smaller partners. And also maybe, maybe my ability to find a good price is limited when it's one platform that I'm buying from. Yeah. I think also these like sort of new age and, you know, a lot of them fit in the more of like mobility commerce or something. There's like Lyft, Uber, DoorDash, you know, they're like retail media companies, but they're sort of in like a weird different space. There's been a lot of consolidation there. Like you listed how, you know, DoorDash has acquired all these companies market by market.

32:40Those are big, like ad businesses too. You know, Lyft is sitting there. It's just a single digit billion company at this point, like probably looking pretty tasty. Like there's just like, like, it feels like this in this category, people are getting on board with this consolidation or even like this community village like or something. I'm thinking back to like when AT &T bought AppNexus and like their idea was like, oh, all the TV companies are going to like divert. They're going to like we do it better. So they're just going to give a hand off their inventory to us. And then it was like, no, no TV companies are going to do that.

33:19And like retailers aren't doing that. Like no retailers are like oh like f it this is just too expensive and like our clients would prefer it if we all just like work together so let's all just like get on the same we all agree we're you know co-op our inventory like retailers are not down with that it took it took walmart years and years and years to get like to the point where they felt comfortable having sam's club and walmart in the same like retail media pool and like they own sam's club so it's like it's hard to imagine other companies like getting on board with this like en masse um yeah but i but actually it's funny because i was about to make the opposite point james um because thinking about go puff being like this is a non-core part of my business i'm just gonna outsource it um it just reminds me a little bit of what's going on actually in the open web, which maybe ties into our first segment where you have Taboola, for example, like managing display for Yahoo.com, for NBCUniversal, and kind of people looking at their plates, deciding this is not strategic.

34:29I'm going to outsource it and just have someone else handle it. And then what does that maybe say about that business? I don't feel like retail media is commoditized. I feel like in the open web, it's happening because a certain part of that business is commoditized. I feel like for retail media, it's more like people really are spread to threat thin. And I think a company like GoPuff is probably being very clear eyed and realizing that it just is going to have a much easier time selling itself if people can bundle it with other inventory. So I don't think it's, I think in one case, it's a scale issue or scale rationale.

35:06In another case, it's a commoditization rationale. But I think you're always going to see that dance of like outsource versus in-house. Right. And it's interesting to see trends in either direction. I think there is like a matter of urgency or something like it is, you know, this category is on board with it, like GoPuff and Instacart and DoorDash and Uber and all these companies are sort of, you know, can get on board with this because there's just like no oxygen in their space. Like all of them pay the, you know, the 30 % Apple tithe. And, you know, these are like tough, low margin businesses trying to figure out, trying to like squeeze their way into grocery, which is already like the lowest margin business there is.

35:50Like there's no margin in the grocery business. And they're trying to figure out how to like pay for the margin of having a human do shopping and then another person like deliver it to your door. Well, it's worked for so many other businesses, though. like when I just think about TVs, like if you look at the quarterly earnings for these TV hardware companies, it's like they've got all this, you know, beautiful, beautiful, high margin ad revenue. And then, you know, but that'll change now too. That's what they're hoping for. With the Roku Fox thing, that's just another fascinating deal of like indifferent coming together.

36:28So James, we're at the end here. So what final thoughts do you have around what all this consolidation means for retail media. And I don't know, like, are Amazon and Walmart, like, are they like, are they shaking in their boots or are they solidly on the ground? It is funny. You brought up the like, free star, like 70 million. And you know, like, it is normal. Like, oh, like you hear like a public company, it's like buy-ins, you know, and it's kind of like low, like hundreds or like tens of millions often. And and then, you know, it's like, oh, it's like Alphabet's earnings tonight. And they're going to have done like a hundred something billion dollars in the past quarter, quarter, like the quarter in the lowest in a bad quarter.

37:12So, you know, like they'll never do less than a hundred billion dollars in a quarter ever again, like for as long as sort of, you know, we can conceive. So it's like the the scale of difference is so ridiculous. list uh amazon would be uh you know 36.8 percent uh x market cap compared to doordash so yeah you know um so yeah so they are you know there is certainly a lot more desperation there's going to be a lot more interest in this and i do think there is uh you know a sense that like let's get it done now like the the you know the current the trump administration is not shutting down a lot of acquisitions that would have been shut down like on antitrust grounds or at least opposed you know even setting aside all like the sort of political lobbying stuff of like paramount skydance or something like that but like you know an albertson's kroger deal that crashed and burned horrifically because it because it got started under the biden administration like maybe that would have just like slid by unopposed now i think that's a really really good point as we've seen another grocery player get acquired by grocery delivery because they are those companies are all much smaller than amazon and so the fact that one failed and this one no one's really i this is the first i've heard of it being you know like how would antitrust regulators looking at look at it not with not too much of an issue i think that's it like normally like oh if you know if doordash bought lyft if uber bought lyft it would be unimaginable maybe like so not so long ago.

38:49Now it's like, oh, like maybe that just, yeah, no one minds about that. Okay. So like I said at the beginning, tis the season for acquisitions. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.

39:08This episode is sponsored by Basis, the leading intelligent operating system for autonomous advertising. Its enterprise AI solution transforms campaign briefs into strategies and media plans that integrate directly into omni-channel activation. Learn more at basis.com.